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The Good Muslim A Novel Tahmima Anam Harper: 297 pp., $25.99 Maya Haque is one of the century's most interesting characters: prickly, passionate, tender, selfless, headstrong, devoted, belligerent, idealistic, naive, wise. "The Good Muslim" is Maya's story, rooted in her devotion to nation and family and particularly to her brother, the tormented Sohail Haque. What is it about Bengali anthropologists? First we have feted novelist Amitav Ghosh from West Bengal and now Tahmima Anam from East Bengal. Both earned doctorates in anthropology before turning to literary fiction. Each draws distinctly from a multi-ethnic Bengali culture that has spawned epic independence...

"You say you want a revolution," John Lennon sang in 1968. "Well, you know, we all want to change the world."
If not all of us, at least plenty of pop stars have, as Dorian Lynskey illustrates in his mammoth "33 Revolutions Per...

American EdenFrom Monticello to Central Park to Our Backyards: What Our Gardens Tell Us About Who We AreWade Graham
Harper: $35
How the American identity and its contradictions — democratic ideals and aristocratic pretensions...

BOSTON — Major, sudden and tragic events create indelible images, mental snapshots that enable people, decades later, to recall where they were when they heard the news: the Sept. 11 attacks; the deaths of John Lennon and Diana, Princess of Wales; Pearl...

Paul Revere was captured on April 18, 1775, before he could warn the residents of Concord, Mass., that the British were coming. (He did make it to Lexington, Mass.)
No Revolutionary War battle was ever fought at Valley Forge, Pa., even though Gen....

Western Arizona
Oatman. If it was good enough for Clark Gable and Carole Lombard on their honeymoon, Oatman should be good enough for you, although it's been 73 years since the Hollywood couple spent their honeymoon night in the allegedly haunted...

For sale: custom vintage auto with Hollywood pedigree. Three-liter V-6 engine, polished aluminum hood, serpent horn, wings. Has history of issues with exhaust system.
Sure, you could drop $2.6 million on a Bugatti Veyron to cruise the Sunset Strip, but...

Cornell Dupree, a versatile guitarist whose long, productive career included performances and recordings with such artists as Aretha Franklin, Paul Simon, Miles Davis and Lena Horne, died Sunday at his home in Fort Worth. Dupree, who had emphysema, was...

When you look at the calendar, the dizzying ride of the Cain Train basically lasted just over two months. It only felt much, much longer.
Herman Cain bolted into the national political conversation with his surprising win at a straw poll among...

There is a word in fitness/health/weight loss marketing that is toxic. Sometimes it is blatant, other times implied. I hate this word. The word is "only."You have to work out only this teeny bit to get amazing results. You only have to take this...

Mike Melvoin, a pianist/composer/arranger whose credits reach from Stan Getz and Frank Sinatra to Michael Jackson and the Beach Boys, and who was the first active musician to serve as national president of the Recording Academy, has died. He was 74.
A...

A video of a 1990s-era Herman Cain signing an ode to pizza to the tune of John Lennon's "Imagine" now making the rounds on the Web is hotter than an extra-large double cheese. It was uncovered by the Omaha World-Herald in the course of doing...

Strike a pose
If you're Madonna and you plan to stage the most fashionable Super Bowl halftime show in years, there's only one way to kick it off: Perform the 1990 smash hit "Vogue" as classic Vogue covers are projected on stage. The Queen of...

John Cage's ideas have long inspired artists inside and outside the experimental music subculture. Besides new-music figures considered disciples or associates — Christian Wolff, Earle Brown, Morton Feldman and David Tudor, for example — he had an...

A contemporary house in the Hollywood Hills West "bird streets" area where Beatle John Lennon once landed has sold, again, for $4.2 million. It had previously changed hands in April, also for $4.2 million.
The seller, from the United...

It isn't always possible to meet your favorite star. In Los Angeles, you often settle for your star's star instead.
When you want to celebrate, when you want to mourn, you commune with your idol's brass and terrazzo stand-in.
The lucky stars are there...

Victor Spinetti, a comic actor and raconteur who won a Tony on Broadway and the adoration of Beatles fans when he appeared in three of the Fab Four's movies, died Tuesday in Monmouth, England. He was 82.
The cause was cancer, said Barry Burnett, the...

"It's that kind of a story where things got so out of control," says O, the narrator of"Savages."She's talking about the plot, but she might be talking about the filmmaking as well. Adapted from the bestselling Don Winslow novel,...

Country singer Kitty Wells had been recording, touring and broadcasting without major success for more than a decade when she accepted an offer in 1952 to record one more song before she planned to turn her attention to staying at home and raising a...

The first song the broader world heard from the Beatles wasn't one of the pop-music gems that seemed to flow so effortlessly from the pens of John Lennon and Paul McCartney, nor was it any of their versions of American R&B and blues songs that were...